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- Title
Stealing Kinship: Neuromancer and Artificial Intelligence.
- Authors
Gutiérrez-Jones, Carl
- Abstract
William Gibson's Neuromancer (1984) taps into anxieties surrounding humanity's status in a world shared with artificial intelligences; in particular, Gibson asks what habits of thought might such intelligences inherit from their makers. Gibson is invested in the possibility of fostering kinship between humans and A.I.s, but he sees propensities in humanity that might well subvert this goal. From early religious beliefs through cyberspatial dreams of escaping the body, Western culture has often demonstrated disdain for fleshly existence. Gibson's self-destructive hacker, Case, provides an opportunity to rethink this disdain; counter-intuitively, his climactic suicidal crisis enables a new, embodiment-friendly kinship. Gibson's imagining of kinship also shapes the novel's formal experimentation; Neuromancer anticipates hyperlinking technology and engages readers in an emulated version so that they might participate, to some degree, in a new form of hybridized intelligence. Specifically, readers practice a hypertextual construction of meaning, building on a convergence of digital (computer) and analog (human pattern-recognition) memory. As modeled by Case, this cognitive shift requires a radical rebooting. The experience of reading the novel, however, also offers an alternative model of transformation, one of extended adaptation that would more gradually reshape cognitive habits toward the kinship Gibson envisions. Ultimately, Neuromancer modulates between these more radical and more gradual models of adaptation.
- Subjects
ARTIFICIAL intelligence in literature; NEUROMANCER (Book); GIBSON, William, 1948-; HUMAN-machine relationship; HUMAN-computer interaction
- Publication
Science Fiction Studies, 2014, Vol 41, Issue 1, p69
- ISSN
0091-7729
- Publication type
Literary Criticism
- DOI
10.5621/sciefictstud.41.1.0069